Category: Writing

The Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (Dryococelus australis) was one of the strangest animals ever to walk the earth.

It lived only on Lord Howe Island, a tiny island of 300 people about halfway between Australia and New Zealand. It was eight inches (20 cm) long. It looked like a weird cross between a cockroach and a lobster, and so it was nicknamed the Tree Lobster. It had no natural predators. It was completely harmless, living in and munching on trees.

In 1918, the SS Makambo ran aground on Lord Howe Island, and thousands of rats escaped like, uh, rats from a sinking ship. The rats ate and bred, and the tree lobster never stood a chance. Within two years, the Lord Howe Island stick insect was extinct.

Except it wasn’t.

The Discovery

Thirteen miles (20 km) southwest of Lord Howe Island is Ball’s Pyramid, an extinct volcano that juts 1,800 feet (560 meters) up from the remote Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the world’s truly beautiful places, and one that very few people ever get to see. But you can see it in this photo:

…and you can go there yourself with on Google Earth, embedded below. Be sure to zoom out until you can see Lord Howe Island, and then a looooooooong way farther until you can see the coast of Australia.

Scientists guessed – hoped, really – that some tree lobsters might have floated the 13 miles from Lord Howe Island to Ball’s Pyramid and established a sustainable population there. There are no trees on Ball’s Pyramid, but there are enough small bushes to provide a food and shelter for some stick insects. And so, two of them (scientists, not stick insects) decided to have a look for themselves.

In February 2001, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile traveled to Ball’s Pyramid to search. They climbed the rock, hundreds of feet above shark-infested waters, to search. And after a few searches, they found some sign of tree lobsters. And by “sign,” I mean “poop.”

But of course a few piles of poop isn’t enough evidence to conclude that a species has apparently risen from the dead. And the stick insect is nocturnal, so to find live animals, they knew they had to go back at night.

And so on the night of February 26, 2001, Priddel and Carlile went back to look again. “Went back” meaning “climbed up a sheer rock face above shark-infested waters in complete darkness.” Yes, they had safety equipment, but it must have still been terrifying.

And they found it: under a single tea tree plant (Melaleuca howeana) was the world’s entire population of Lord Howe Island Stick Insects. Twenty-four of them. The scientific paper Priddel and Carlile wrote uses detached academic prose, which completely fails to hide their excitement:

Two members of the survey team (N.C. and D.H.) ascended the Pyramid at night to conduct a nocturnal search of the area surrounding the shrub… Reaching this site at approximately [10 PM], they found, observed and photographed two adult female D. australis on the outer edges of the shrub (Figure 2).

These specimens, the first to be seen alive in more than 70 years, were highly conspicuous, their glossy bodies strongly reflecting the [flashlight]…

(Priddle, Carlile, Humphrey, Fellenberg, & Hiscox, 2003)

The Current Situation

Two years later in 2003, scientists returned to Ball’s Pyramid to collect specimens. They returned with two males and two females, which they sent to the Melbourne Zoo to start a captive breeding program.

Seventeen years and fifteen tree lobster generations later, a healthy population of 14,000 tree lobsters lives in captivity – mostly in Melbourne, with some pairs in zoos all over the world. Once rats are eliminated from Lord Howe Island (which they’re also working on), the plan is to reintroduce the tree lobster to its original habitat.

It’s a rare success story in a world full of creatures we are driving to extinction. But let’s take our success stories when we can. There’s hope.

More information

If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating story, check out these resources:

• The Wikipedia article on the tree lobster (Dryococelus australis)
• This excellent NPR story by Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich
• The paper announcing the discovery (Priddle, Carlile, Humphrey, Fellenberg, & Hiscox, 2003). The abstract is public but the article is paywalled. If you’d like to read it in full, let me know, I might have a friend that can find it.
• This absolutely brilliant Australian animated short film about the tree lobster, linked there and embedded below

How you can help

The captive breeding program is expensive, so if this story is calling to you through a world full of need, the Melbourne Zoo is accepting donations to continue their work. Here is a two-page fundraising brochure explaining the program. If you feel called to donate to conservation biology more generally, a good place to start is the World Wildlife Fund. Obviously no pressure to donate during these trying times. I have no affiliation with either entity, so no conflict of interest.

Postscript

This has been super-fun, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Here’s that animated film, embedded via Vimeo.

Be sure to check out the rest of my series on Things That Are Not What They Seem, Except They Weren’t.

Wikipedia is banned in the People’s Republic of China. You can imagine what the country’s notoriously repressive and information-controlling  government might think of a “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

Instead, China offers Baidu Baike, an editable encyclopedia site that is like Wikipedia, except that all entries are reviewed and approved by one of China’s many, many full-time Internet censors. In other words, not like Wikipedia at all.

You won’t find a Baidu Baike article on ???? (the “June Fourth Incident,” their name for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests), and the article on ?? (Democracy) is underwhelming. But these curious omissions notwithstanding, Baidu Baike has more than 15 million articles covering all aspects of life in the People’s Republic of China.

In early 2009, a series of new articles appeared called the Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures (??????), profiling some of the legendary creatures of Chinese folklore. The most famous of these was the famous grass mud horse, one of the most beloved creatures of Chinese mythology.

Except it wasn’t – the whole thing was an adolescent joke.

Chinese is a a tonal language, in which words are built up from simple components and vocally distinguished by the relative pitch of your voice. Thus the opportunity for puns are endless – and grass mud horse (???, pronounced “C?o Ní M?,” which sounds very similar to the Chinese words for “f*ck your mother” (not providing the translation so I don’t get down-ranked by search engines that know Chinese).

The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures articles didn’t last long. Although they were perhaps mildly amused, the authorities were Not Impressed, and took down each article soon after it appeared, with little fanfare – and, as far as I can tell, no repercussions for the anonymous editors who posted them. But sometimes, a thing on the Internet becomes A THING ON THE INTERNET, and the 10 mythical creatures became such a thing. And none was a greater THING than the grass mud horse. It’s not immediately obvious how to depict an imaginary pun-based animal, but the Internet quickly decided that the grass mud horse looked like an alpaca.

As the grass mud horse became more and more popular, in One Of Those Bizarre Things That Happens Sometimes, it quickly took on an additional significance: as the unofficial mascot of the fight against internet censorship in China. It soon acquired an elaborate pun-based mythology: the only natural enemy of the grass mud horse is the river crab (??, héxiè), whose name sounds like the Chinese government’s “harmonious society” policy, of which Internet censorship is a part. The river crab is usually depicted as “wearing three wristwatches” (????, dài s?n ge bi?o), which sounds like the “Three Represents” interpretation of communism promoted by former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. It all came together in the Song of the Grass Mud Horse video, widely viewed on YouTube – except in China, which bans YouTube. Watch it below, with English subtitles:

Eventually, the censors caught on and banned the grass mud horse too. But it was fun while it lasted, and it has lived on as a symbol of the Chinese resistance. Sadly, that resistance has been powerless to stop censorship, particularly with the government’s new social credit system. But it was fun while it lasted. Because:

If your friend sent you a photo of an alpaca, at least you knew you weren’t alone.

April 30, 1943, off the coast of Spain.

World War II had been raging for nearly five years, but the Allies were finally starting to gain the upper hand. Both sides knew that the next logical battlefront would be an Allied invasion of somewhere in Southern Europe. The Germans were on high alert for any advance knowledge of the Allies’ plans. Late that night, a Spanish fisherman found a body floating in shallow water – wearing a British Royal Marines uniform with a locked a briefcase chained around its waist – and reported it to local police. Spain was officially neutral but informally allied with Germany, so the find soon ended up in the hands of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency.

The briefcase contained documents identifying the late soldier as Major William Martin. Martin’s briefcase also contained a letter from a high-ranking British army officer, addressed to another, with instructions to Martin to hand-deliver. The letter covered a number of topics, but most importantly for the story, described in detail the planned Allied invasion of Greece. When Hitler read the letter, he ordered more than 5,000 German troops to Greece to repel the invasion, along with fighters and U-boats to support them.

Thanks to this move, the Allies encountered little resistance in their invasion of Sicily.

Which of course was the plan all along.

And thus, presenting the man who saved Europe: Major William Martin.

Except he wasn’t.

He really did save Europe, but he really wasn’t Major William Martin. He was really Glyndwr Michael (first name pronounced GLIN-dor), a homeless man from Wales who died from eating rat poison. It was either a tragic accident or a suicide – we’ll never know for sure. Either way, he had no living relatives, so he was perfect for the plan; no living relatives means no one to ask where the body went.

British intelligence agents dressed Michael in a Major’s uniform, provided him with fake documents (including fake love letters from a fake fiancée), and published a fake obituary in the London Times. They included the all-important letter, which contained a mix of easily-verifiable truths and completely fictional invasion plans. Then they loaded Michael/Martin’s body onto the submarine HMS Seraph. At 4:15 AM on April 30th, the Seraph surfaced, its commanding officer led a service of burial at sea, and the crew lowered the body into the water. The fisherman found the body the same day, and the rest is history.

After the war ended, the body of Michael/Martin was returned to the British and buried in the British section of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad Cemetery in Huelva, Spain, not far from where it was first found.

There the story remained until 1953, when the British decided to reveal the truth. The commanding officer of the intelligence operation wrote The Man Who Never Was, which became a movie of the same name. But even in those works, the identity of “the man who never was” was not revealed. Finally, in 1996, an amateur historian identified the body as Michael’s. And in 1997, the British took the unprecedented step of carving a new message into the gravestone:

Glyndwr Michael; Served as Major William Martin, RM

And soon after, this man who would have likely been forgotten got a memorial in his hometown, reading:

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS
In recognition of services
to the allied war effort
by
GLYNDWR MICHAEL
of
Aberbargoed

4 February 1909 – 24 April 1943

Postscript

Thanks to one of my Internet Heroes, Tom Scott, for introducing me to this story thanks to his Things You Might Not Know video series: